Google vs BMW? Alphabet Trademark Already Owned by the Auto Maker

dgstorm

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Jan 5, 2011
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It's possible that Google and BMW might get into a trademark fight very soon. We reported a couple days ago that Google has split itself off into a few different companies with a new umbrella corporation called Alphabet at the top. Unfortunately for Google, the German auto-maker BMW already owns the trademark and alphabet.com domain name.

Normally, this isn't as big of a deal as you might think. Companies can share the same trademark as long as their respective products are not easily confused by consumers. For the most part that shouldn't be a problem between Google and BMW; however, Google is developing self-driving cars, and of course, cars are the main product for BMW, so there could be a problem here.

According to the source of this report, BMW is considering taking legal action against Google. It's also interesting that the alphabet.com domain has been overloaded ever since Google's press announcement on this subject. To be honest, we aren't even sure why BMW owns the domain or what they would use it for. Let's just cross our fingers that another patent war doesn't break out...

Source: http://www.autoblog.com/2015/08/11/google-alphabet-bmw-trademark-dispute/
 
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